Test Mastery

“We heard from several friends that The Learning Consultants helped their children produce astonishing results in the SAT (or ACT or SSAT or graduate school tests)”.

So starts the most common introduction from new clients as they hope there is room in our test prep classes or with our top test prep teachers for their student-child.

Ask Your Sources About The Learning Consultants

When we receive calls from those – perhaps like you – who have found us through a web search, we encourage the caller to ask their own trusted sources about us. Self-representation is questionable since most comments are self-serving. For that reason, please do ask the most educated parents who know about our company and/or “who is the best” at test prep in Connecticut? We are not as well known to the general public as the franchises. But, anyone “in the know” in our Connecticut service areas will come to us for any high stakes standardized tests.

As to how we have become the best… we will provide some thoughts as we realize that not everyone has access to our past clients.

Master Test Prep Teachers

Through both recent scientific studies as well as anecdotal examination of the concept of mastery, 10,000 hours has emerged as the magical baseline of time required to master a skill.

That’s a lot of time. There are very few test prep teachers that have put in anything close to that amount of time in developing themselves into master test prep teachers. We have 3 on our team and about 7 who are on their way to reaching that mark in the next few years.

There is no franchise – none – that will have teachers who come close to this number.

Why? Franchises hire test prep teachers who are passing through. They are in graduate school or making extra money or working part-time for a few years at the local Princeton Review or Kaplan or Sylvan. Few, if any, work full time. Few, if any, stay for more than a few years. The pay is low. The hours are not guaranteed. The best teachers most often leave graduate school and move onward. Even the very few who end up making a career at the franchises and therefore have an opportunity to become master test prep teachers most often head towards higher paid management opportunities.

Simply due to the structure and pay scale of our company, we are able to retain the best teachers, enable the teachers to put in the time to become masterful, and keep our best teachers year after year. Our retention rate for our best teachers is nearly 100% with only life factors such as moving or child-care creating rare attrition. We treat our teachers exceptionally well. And, they, in turn, become master teachers who treat our clients exceptionally well.

As such, our best teachers have put in thousands of hours of test prep and you/your child will have one of those teachers, not the recently hired grad student who has had a ten-hour training course but minimal real test prep teaching experience.

Highly Advanced Training In Both Motivation and Performance Psychology

Perhaps the chief differentiation of our work compared to other test prep providers is our ability to shift the energy of our students in order to self-study and to perform optimally.

Both issues are largely ignored by most every test prep provider.

In relation to the need to inspire, the best results come from students who not only apply themselves during the lessons but also practice what they have learned thereafter.

Most test prep programs do nothing to engage students to care after they leave class. This is a big mistake.

Our unique expertise is in shifting the motivation of our students by getting them to care for their own reasons. Upon doing so, the student will work outside the classroom. This can make a significant difference.

As to performance psychology, the number of students who have issues with focusing (usually those crazy hyper boys!); test-taking anxiety or test-taking blocks such as perfectionism (which causes great suffering during standardized testing) is highly underreported. Many parents will call and many students will report that they underperform on high stakes tests (both in school and on standardized tests) and that the underperformance is not due to a lack of conceptual understanding but rather psychological challenges.

Perhaps here, more than any other area, our hours of working with students over the years has given us unique insight on how to decrease anxiety, deal with compulsions, like perfectionism, and make students focus for longer periods of time.

Superior and Customized Test Prep Design

Think about visiting a master craftsman. There is something special in the design of whatever is created. This is less true with masters in the service professions. But, you likely have encountered at least one advisor or trainer or business owner who had conceived of a process so brilliant and was able to tailor the process to suit your needs so well that you raved thereafter.

After expressing great things about our test prep results and our test prep teachers, the next area that clients typically rave about is the design of our test prep programs. “You have obviously given great care to figuring out how to make a test prep program succeed”.